Sunni tribes unite with enemies to fight Iraq's rulers

Baghdad: “In the end, for us in Fallujah, it was a question of 'to be or not to be'."

Trapped in a state-sponsored campaign of violence and harassment with no end in sight, 27-year-old Bashir al-Ani says he had no choice but to pick up a weapon and join his Sunni tribe in the fight against Iraq’s Shiite-led government.

That was four months ago, well before the brutal forces of the Islamic State arrived in Mosul and took control of Iraq’s second largest city as soldiers deserted in their thousands.

For many Sunni leaders there is not one but two separate battles being waged in Iraq: a Sunni tribal revolution against the oppressive government of Nouri al-Maliki and the Sunni militants fighting for an Islamic state that now stretches across the borders of Iraq and Syria.

That one storm front has, for the moment, joined the other is just another chapter in the shifting loyalties between groups and factions in a country that has been mired deep in conflict for more than a decade.

For at least a year before he took up arms, Bashir says, he and his fellow citizens had been staging peaceful demonstrations to protest against the Iraqi army’s campaign of arrests, torture and harassment of Sunni citizens.

Advertisement

“We protested peacefully against the government but no one listened to us,” he says. “We had no choice but to carry our guns and defend ourselves.”

“We have so many people jailed in arbitrary arrests, women are raped in prison, people are tortured and kidnapped for ransom.”

Now, he says, the tribes control Fallujah and the Iraqi army – both hated and feared for its random air strikes – is unable to enter the area. “This is not about the Islamic State, this is a tribal revolution against the Maliki government. This is a fight for Iraq and every man and woman, old and young, is defending Fallujah from the al-Maliki army.

“We don't support the militants, we don’t share their beliefs – all we want is a secular Iraq where everyone has their rights.” Yes the Islamic State has a presence in the city of 400,000 that lies 70 kilometres from Baghdad, Bashir acknowledges, but they are very much in the minority, making up not more than 10-15 per cent of the tribal fighters who number in their thousands.

For now, he says, it is a daily fight for survival in Fallujah.

This week alone, Iraqi army airstrikes have killed dozens in Fallujah, Bashir says, including 12 in an attack on the city of al-Andalus and 20-25 dead in Azrakhiya. Three days ago a bakery full of people in Nazaal was struck and 30 people were killed, he says.

"We no longer call it the Iraqi army because it is not an army that protects all Iraqis, it is an army established solely to hurt and kill Sunnis, so instead, we call it the Maliki army,” Bashir says.

“The airstrikes are random – they are striking everything from homes, hospitals, schools, markets and even cemeteries – they are not just targeting the militants, they are targeting all of Fallujah.”

The military denies the allegations. Colonel Qasim Kamal Zghair, a spokesman from the Iraqi army’s Baghdad Operations Centre, dismissed the grievances as “all part of the media war”.

“We do not launch air strikes on families, we target only the Islamic State and the armed groups they are working with,” the colonel says.

“We are fighting a war against terrorists and the media have turned this into a war against the Iraqi people.”

Most people have left the area after repeated warnings from the military, he says. “Only a small number of tribes have betrayed us and they are fighting together with the ex-Baathists in the Naqshbandi on the side of the militants.”

But reality is a more complex beast – one acknowledged by the Prime Minister himself on Wednesday, when he announced a general amnesty for anyone who fought with or supported the insurgents.

In a speech broadcast on Iraqiya, the state television channel, al-Maliki’s offer was directed at Sunni tribal leaders, whose support was critical in gathering the tribes together to force al-Qaeda militants out of the country in 2008.

“I’m announcing an amnesty to all tribes and all people involved in this, there are no exceptions, for everyone,” he said. “I’m welcoming them to join other tribes to fight ISIS, this is in their interests, the interests of their tribes and their sons.”

WHEN Sheikh Ali Hatem al-Suleimani, the leader of the powerful Dulaimi tribe, urged the West this week to view the Sunni-led tribal offensive as a rebellion against the Shiite-dominated al-Maliki government by an oppressed group, he complicated what has been a deceptively simple narrative.

It suits the Iraqi government and its backers to paint the Islamic State’s advance as one large militant insurgency that has drawn in other Sunni groups such as tribes and ex-officers from Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime.

Instead it is little more than a loose, informal alliance that includes some of those ex-officers along with other Sunni groups, some of whom have already had their differences with the Islamic State.

Sheikh al-Suleimani vowed that once al-Maliki was gone and Iraq’s Sunnis were afforded full rights under a new constitution the tribal fighters would turn on the Islamic State and force them out. It was a promise echoed by many tribal fighters interviewed by Fairfax Media.

It would not be the first time the tribes have taken up arms against Islamic extremists.

In 2008 the so-called “Sunni Awakening” saw the Sunni tribes – who had originally fought against the US occupation of Iraq – change sides and force al-Qaeda from their base in the western province of Anbar, and, ultimately, out of Iraq.

In late November last year, Syria’s powerful Sunni tribal leaders gathered with their Iraqi counterparts in the United Arab Emirates.

They met to consider the establishment of another “Awakening” or Sahwa as it is known in Arabic, to push back against the significant gains made by the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, as it was then known, across the oil-producing region of eastern Syria that borders Iraq.

But it never got off the ground. As one tribal leader who attended the meeting told me back then, the initiative was just too late.

“Tribes will fight the regime [of Bashar al-Assad] but they will not fight ISIL … because it is too late – their sons are enrolled in these two groups and those who have not joined will soon follow,” said Sheikh Nawaf al-Bashir, head of the prominent Baqara tribe.

In the northern city of Tikrit, the second Iraqi city to fall into the hands of ISIL, who used their mass executions of local soldiers to boost their profile on social media and spread fear in the community, tribal fighters also insist the Sunni militants' days are numbered.

“Sometimes we fight with them, sometimes we fight against them,” says 23-year-old Omar Saleh of the complex relationship between the tribes and the militants occupying part of Tikrit. “We fought the battle against al-Qaeda,” he says, “we were in a Sahwa, now we are in a revolution.”

The plan is to liberate Tikrit and drive both the Iraqi army and the Islamic State out of town.

“We are stronger than the Islamic State – we are fighting for the love of our country and we know our city so well; they are just strangers here,” Omar says, referring to the high number of international fighters in the Islamic State’s forces.

There was no doubt the behaviour of al-Maliki’s government forced the tribe’s hand, Sabah Karkhout al-Halbousi, the president of the Anbar Provincial Council, told Fairfax Media in Baghdad.

“The people of Anbar had legal demands and the government was not ever serious about granting their rights."

One of the key demands, he says, was a general pardon for all those arbitrarily detained on behalf of their relatives. “We have over 30,000 prisoners, including 56 women who were detained on behalf of their husbands or brothers,” al-Halbousi says.

For a year the government ignored the Sunni protests. And for a year their resentment grew.

“When the army attacked Anbar it caused all the people of the province to get involved in the conflict,” al-Halbousi says. “The sleeping cells of ISIL in Anbar have nothing to do with the tribes, they are just making things more difficult for us. ISIL may be fighting the government forces but the most powerful group in Anbar are the tribes.”

Sheikh Amir Hameed al-Hazaawy is one tribal leader who vows that the Islamic militants will not establish a foothold in his area – the neighbourhood of al-Adhamiya.

With a tan leather gun holster over his dishdash and a pistol sitting on his desk, the 77-year-old sheikh says his tribe controls the streets.

“On November 10, 2007, we received a call for the sons of this city to come together and get rid of al-Qaeda – we did this and we have never stopped our Awakening, it is continuous.”

There is no escaping the shared hatred of the government of Iraq. Even prominent Shiite cleric Mahmoud al-Sarkhi has joined other critical Shiite voices and lent his support to the Sunnis' claims they have been systematically undermined, or worse, by the government.

Describing their revolution as a “dignity revolt” he says he warned the situation would reach crisis point because Sunnis have been mistreated and humiliated for years.

For now, says Mohamed Abu Omar, a 24-year-old fighter from outside Fallujah, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and the shaky links between the tribes and the Islamic State remains as their battles are fought in stereo.